Saturday, May 09, 2009

Mythos: Two Studios, One New Beginning

After Flagship flagshipped themselves, the free-to-play faux-MMOG Mythos disappeared off the gaming landscape. Now there is news that Hannbitsoft managed to hang on to the Mythos license and tech upon Flagship’s demise and are putting not one, but two, development studios to work on resurrecting the game:
The funny thing about Mythos is that it was essentially finished, with future plans being more about additional content than sweeping changes. Hannbitsoft, however, seem to have tasked the new studio (two of ‘em, in fact - T3 Entertainment and Redbana US) with a fairly significant rethink. “MYTHOS is currently in a good condition where it’s being reconstructed” says the official release. “We are trying to keep the strengths that MYTHOS used to have, and strengthen them even more to make more suited as an online game.”
While the linked article notes that Mythos was "essentially finished", something I strongly disagree with, the questions have to be asked.

Will it remain free-to-play?
How many changes will be made?
And what's the end goal? Traditional MMO? Quick time waster? Other!?

When I last played Mythos, Flagship was in the process of gutting the game from a Guild Wars-style hub-world design to an "Overworld" traditional MMOG. I did not like the move and I believe Mythos lost its charm in the process.

It will be interesting to see what the new developers do with Mythos. I am hoping they can put the technology behind the game to better use than Flagship. The original idea that Mythos was going to be updated on-the-fly while gamers were playing never came to fruition and by the end of Flagship's existence, Mythos turned from a neat little testbed for Hellgate's multiplayer tech to a washed out hack'n'slash game trying to be an MMOG.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Join the conversation; leave a comment!